As The International Labour Organisation has recognised ‘domestic workers, whether working in their home countries or abroad, are vulnerable to many forms of abuse, harassment and violence, in part because of the intimacy and isolation of the workplace’.

What is likely to make a difference this time is that the allegations of violence against Abrew have been taken up by the Domestic Workers Union (DWU). The union has been able to mobilise support from fourteen other civil society organisations and trade unions, including the International Domestic Workers Federation and the Women’s Political Academy.

The feminization of housework means that domestic work is considered low skilled, not ‘real work’. It is subject to the idiosyncratic standards and whims of each household, where varying degrees of docility and acquiesce are encouraged. I have seen domestic workers in Sri Lankan homes managed through the smallest of gestures – the nod of a head, a glance, the movement of fingertips.

Using figures from the International Labour Organisation, Verité Research has highlighted a worldwide increase in demand for domestic workers. Verité estimates that one in every thirteen women in the labour force will be a domestic worker. To use statistically crude imagery, on a packed London double decker bus, which at full capacity takes 84 people, you would be rubbing shoulders with at least six women domestic workers.

The power to capture and consume the time of others is what maintains and fixes modern class differences and the accumulation of status, the sociologist Bev Skeggs has argued recently.

Wetherell observe, “wherever the multiple between the wages of the rich and the poor grows, so does the number of servants.”

In her rousing Birkbeck Annual Law Lecture in 2013, the scholar Angela Davis suggested that in the twentieth century, the situation of black women domestic workers in North America approximated that found in slavery.

The threat of zero or negative inflation means that households and firms, which are heavily indebted, find it difficult to service their debt, partly because its real value increases with falling prices and also because current household income is falling and firms are reluctant to invest in view of expected falling demand.

This is the ECB-handicap hypothesis (Angeloni et al. 2003). In terms of labour market reforms, this hypothesis suggests that labour markets should become more flexible if more jobs are to be created, which would promote growth.

Inflexible labour markets do not appear to be as important as insufficient aggregate demand in explaining the euro area’s inability to increase income and employment. If at all important, they are so in the long run.

It is concluded that, for the euro area, like for the United States, that the short-term effect on the price level is very small, while the long-term effect on prices is significant.

the key to avoiding deflation in the euro area, and elsewhere, is not to introduce structural reforms. It is, rather, a solid growth of domestic demand.

Scrutiny of actual experiences reveals a tragic tale of crippling debt, appalling market prices and a technology prone to failure in the absence of very specific and onerous management techniques, which are not suited to smallholder production. As stated by a farmer during a Malian public consultation on GMOs, "What's the point of encouraging us to increase yields with GMOs when we can't get a decent price for what we already produce?"

The book argues among other things that through the 90s the Bank bent much too much to the concern of NGOs, relatively unrepresentative NGOs. And that as a result, the Bank departed too much from it's competitive advantage in infrastructure, focusing perhaps too much on projects, softer projects such as social and education projects, that safeguard policies and other standards are too much for the poorer countries, and that projects vital to the world's poor are being held up by fear of the activists' resistance.

And among the projects that the book highlights in this regard is the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline, a project that Ms. Djiraibe has worked on for a long time, the past decade or so I assume, and worked for what she has just this week received the RFK Human Rights Award. It's also a project that Mr. Rosenblum is familiar with and has worked on in both Chad and Cameroon.

But while we embark on the debate today regarding Chad-Cameroon and the NGOs, I hope we also don't lose sight of some of the broader and perhaps ultimately more important themes that are in the book and also raised by the issue of NGOs and the World Bank, themes about how exactly to deliver development effectively. Whether development is best left to relationships between large institutions, such as the World Bank and host governments, what is, or is there any role of local communities, what is the role of NGOs in amplifying the voices of local communities. And I think also what is the role and should there be standards that apply to the development process of the Bank or should there be more discretion left for both Bank staff and the governments?

So you've got these waves. And I could see that another wave was happening after 9/11, terrorism was leading to a new concern for failed states and therefore for development. And we've seen that in the development of the Millenium Challenge Account, the President's AIDS Initiative, the really quite substantial increase in development assistance in the last couple of years.

And when you look at that period it's sort of framed by two events, which lead directly to our topic today. One is that on the 50th anniversary of the World Bank you had this 50 years is enough campaign, that was in 1994, with a big demonstration in Madrid at the annual meeting, which was effectively an anti-globalization protest, although we didn't have that back then.

But I think basically the motivation is the correct one, you're trying to do this job and you spent five years reaching out under a president who really knows how to reach out and you're still encircled.

And that was kind of the conundrum that I came up against when I was doing my research. And this led me to feel that a subset of civil society does not have an off switch. And first of all it's not all of civil society. I think it's already been explained, I'm not talking about NGOs that do projects really. I'm talking about, I'm not really talking about NGOs in the south, which I regard as a really healthy expression of voice of sort of pluralism and so on, I'm talking about activist NGOs in the north, and even then only a small subset of them. So I just want to make that clear.

And there are examples in the book of quite good partnership. I mean, OXFAM partnered with the World Bank and so did Jubilee 2000, sort of the antecedents of Jubilee 2000 in getting the first round of debt relief done, in doing either replenishment, more money for the self-loan window.

I will say a few comments about the Chad-Cameroon portion of Mallaby's writing, which I think is poorly researched, filled with misrepresentations and often inconsistent. He does not refer to the regularly published official project monitoring reports commissioned by the World Bank itself, the international advisory group and the external monitoring group. These are public reports that anyone with internet access can obtain. These reports consistently warn of the lack of adequate measures to protect the environment, the indigenous people, and public health and also to build the capacity of the Chadian and Cameroonian government.His reference to the Bank's inspection panel report is simply wrong. And I will come back to that.

Mallaby bases much of his information on Ellen Brown. Ellen Brown is an anthropologist on Exxon's payroll.

Mallaby shows that he has no understanding of the international coalition being formed by NGOs, effectively linking the local level to the level of the global decision making.

he says that northern NGOs were putting out the theory that oil was fueling human rights abuses by the northern military. But it was the Chadian human rights organizations that warned of these human rights abuses and asked NGOs in the north to help publicize these problems.

He says that the fighting and imprisonments brought down the wrath of the NGOs. Why should it not? The World Bank and Exxon certainly did not say anything about it.

This led to the release of Mr. Yorongar, a member of the parliament and candidate in the Chadian presidential elections, but only after he had been severely tortured. He had to be flown to Paris for medical treatment at the Primo Levy Clinic for the Victims of Torture.

World Bank staff had not done anything, nor had Exxon or Ellen Brown. It was thanks to the good cooperation of Chadian human rights organizations with what Mallaby calls an environmental outfit in Washington, which in this case may help save the life of a national leader in Chad.

But you also mentioned that you meet with NGOs in southern Chad and found them open and impressive. Yes, they are, the NGOs we are working with for a long time and who have fought for fair compensation for the villages. It was not Ellen Brown. Ellen Brown has evaluated the compensation about the mango tree at tree dollar one mango tree. But when the NGOs came in they fight and get the mango tree to be compensated up to now a thousand of dollar. So it was NGOs who work.

But I think that we should try also to reach out to address some of the broader issues and the question of the role of NGOs generally, positive and negative.

I've been an admirer and a critic of NGOs in the human rights movement and have a lot to say about the problems and the ways that NGOs have operated in different times and the limits of what NGOs can do when it comes to particular kinds of campaigns. And at the same time I've been a great enthusiast for the development of NGOs, particularly in the south, echoing something that Sebastian said, and the importance of the role that they play.

I'm pleased to hear the way in which Sebastian has framed his critic now as being a narrow critic of NGOs. But I feel from my reading of him so far that that isn't what's coming out and that's not what's said in what he's written. And I hope that after today's meeting he'll go and he'll write that article in that more affirmative way. Because from reading the book or from reading other articles what one picks up on immediately is even the language around the NGOs, the references to some of it his own, some of it coming from elsewhere but you hear about the swarming, we hear about the flakiness, we hear about the screaming of NGOs.

The reason why Exxon Mobile brought Helen Brown in to play the role that she did, and I'd like to come back to that also, is because of the pressure of NGOs. And the fear of the swarm that he refers will certainly have a lot to do with the pressures that came up through Shell Oil, one of the collaborators at that time.

In the sense that having seen what happened in Nigeria and what was going on elsewhere that the potential for being subject to pressures from the public over time were such that Exxon would have to take an affirmative role towards trying to allay the problems that would otherwise arise. And he says, and I think that it's an important thing to note, and that anyone of us I think would agree with, that to a large degree Exxon Mobile brought in the World Bank as a decoy to take the pressure off of them for what they would otherwise face. And I think we can agree around these issues. But let's come back to how important the NGOs were for even getting off the ground, even getting one step moving on the oil companies' part.

And one of the major issues was governance, was subjecting the revenues to some kind of meaningful transparent control and oversight. And those issues were brought up by the NGOs, but muddied by their particular concerns around issues of the environment or indigenous peoples.

The reason why the NGOs fought along the lines they did was because that's what the Bank was willing to listen to because they have those safeguard policies and they aren't open to because they don't have safeguard policies around governance and human rights.

So the groups that would have been inalterably opposed to whale exploitation perhaps when they first got stepped in met Chadian activists, realized that there was something else going on there. There were development issues that needed to be addressed and came back with other ideas and other ways of working and tried to extend even the limits of their own mandates, sometimes with resistance from other NGOs who were there.

But what we saw around Chad Cameroon was a building of coalitions around these issues and a pushing of barriers that the Bank itself had in place because of its limited safeguard policies to a point where some serious issues were taken on. They were taken on. How far we got with them is another question.

One of the first Bank directors on the ground there, the predecessor to Gregor Binkert who is here in the room, expressed her concern at the time that the Bank when push came to shove, when they were really forced to enforce the positions that they had taken, that the Bank didn't have the culture that would enable it to step up to the plate, to play hardball. And the only way that they were going to be able to do that was from continuing pressure from the NGO community to make them stand up and to do that. Similar kinds of arguments have been heard from some of the corporations and others about being able to take the steps that they did in the first place and being able to then go further then they would have done as corporate actors.

The story of compensation at this moment on the ground seems to be a growing tragedy. And it seems to be that the good intentions that were discussed by the anthropologists at some point have not been able to be implemented for a variety of reasons. And they go to the character, perhaps the character. Unfortunately we have, and everybody on the ground there, is focused too much on the character of an individual and the role that she played. I think the story is a much broader story than that.

I think that is the spreading of pluralism, of democracy, of the creation of the kind of governance in developing countries, which you need to make any kind of economic progress happen. You need checks and balances, transparency, conversation, argument. And southern NGOs are very much central to that. And to the extent that northerners are kind of giving them voice and giving them funds to be able to protect that voice it's a good thing. So that's one point to make.

by the early 90s it swung down to the middle roughly because they created the safeguards, they had an environmental department, an environmental vice presidency. And some critics of the Bank were saying that the center for thinking and work on an environment and development was the World Bank. So somewhere around the early mid 90s I think that you sort of get to a sort of central position.

And I would say that then that the pendulum swung a bit too far. And so I was trying to yank this pendulum and move it back to the rational center. I regard the rational center as being expressed in the comments over here. I mean, this is sort of measured reasonable criticism. We can have a reasonable debate about the details that Delphine referred to.

And the other thing is that sort of the phrases like the screamers and all that. If you read the book, which of course I hope you do, it's a vividly, I try to write vividly, I try to give a sense of drama, and these sorts of adjectives are not confined by any means to civil society. Jim Wolfensohn would have a few things to say about the use of this language and his volcanic eruption after the publication of the book sort of testifies to that.

And you also said that ìExxon's new molasses-capped road they said was insufferably dusty. I found that just insulting, you know. Because we are talking about the dust and we are not talking about the dust that lies on the molasses. And I don't know if that could make sense. And I think also that development is about people and it's not about the international institutions or about the powerful companies. And the development could not be effective if the environment is not protected.

About the representation of the NGOs, I think that what is said by NGOs in the north is what their partners from the south wanted them to say. I mean, it's not NGOs in the north sitting here in the north and doing whatever they want. We don't have another mean to have our voices heard from the north. And thanks to the NGOs in the north we can do something here in Washington where this is a decision making place.

And when it comes to human rights we don't really need to prove that you are representing a group of people as long as you are saying something that is right in the point of view of the human rights while protecting people's rights. So it's of use, it's evident that you are representing those whose rights are violated by this project. So I think that it's not a real debate, it's just trying to phase out from real debate to ask for the legitimacy of NGOs who are talking on behalf of poor people. Yeah, I think that's all.

And I really do think that it would be wonderful to have Sebastian pursue that subject in the affirmative way that he's referred to here in order to get the word out because I think he's right that he in overlooking the positive.

And his writing at this point serves the cause of those critics. And, in particular, I guess I'm aware of the critics coming from the American Enterprise Institute and from the right who have been on an assault against the NGO movement and particularly around these issues of democracy and credibility and legitimacy.

But are we addressing them with an intention to achieve what Sebastian refers to, this more pluralism, more democracy? Or as some of those writing in the American Enterprise or on NGO Watch on the website are I think intent on doing, really undermining the NGO movement to the advantage of the United States and the sole superpower and the role that it should play as a democracy and that others don't have the right to play.

I wish he had seen the meeting that I intended at the World Bank with Delphine and with several others where the World Bank several months before the project was adopted where somehow mysteriously the World Bank had mobilized to bring so-called NGO leaders from Chad and Cameroon. And no one knew who they were and how they got there, at first.

Well, it turned out that many of these people in this group themselves had very dubious basis for being there in that meeting or themselves had been led into the meeting without knowing what they were doing.

But this issue of accountability, of legitimacy within the NGO movement is one that the credible NGOs have been dealing with for some time and will continue to struggle with. But I think that we have to be careful about feeding the frenzy that has grown in the attack on the NGO movement.

I can guarantee you that the right will hate the book. They're going to hate the book because it's basically sympathetic towards the role the World Bank tries to play.

The right way to deal with episodes where NGOs do, which by the way is not Chad-Cameroon, in my book there are other examples which I regard as much clearer, open and shut examples of NGO campaigns that were wrong, flat wrong. And I don't think this about Chad-Cameroon and the book doesn't say this about Chad-Cameroon.

I do regard opposition to western China poverty project, which the Tibetan (unintelligible) picked up as a very bad campaign. And I had a whole chapter about that, and it's not a subject of today's debate.

I think that you've done a very clever job of talking to your audience. You provided what actually you critique NGOs for doing. I think that you provided a very biased, an inaccurate description of your book. And the outraged part of me says and you can't get away with it. Your book does not say I am going to look at one to two percent of NGO campaigns. Your book does not say 98 to 99 percent of campaigns, and therefore most of the campaigns have been really useful.

This is interesting that your book doesn't do it. Because what your book does do, and does a wonderful job of doing is saying let me look at James Wolfensohn warts and all, he's part good, part bad. Let me look at the good, let me look at the bad and then come up with what do I think of this man in the end and what do we think of him. You've just presented your book as if it does that on NGOs. That's not what you do. That's not what your articles on foreign policy do.

on your methodology could you tell us how many hours you spent interviewing James Wolfensohn and World Bank people? And then how many days you spent on the ground in Chad-Cameroon and in China, and what resources besides Ö we've heard a lot about Chad-Cameroon Ö but what resources besides Robert Wade's work is your China chapter based on? So a methodological question.

I'm a representative of Mr. Ngarlejy Yorongar, North America, the last elected president of the past election in Chad. We really appreciate the opportunity. It is a pleasure for me to be here myself. What the World Bank is doing in Chad it is catastrophic. Can you explain that people live in the region that oil is getting out, talk in presence of foreign oil that went to Chad, about composition of those three at the gun point.

My leader almost lost his life for the last election. He was in favor of the NGO, he's still alive. And I'm really surprised about what the World Bank is doing in the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline project is the wrong matter for other countries. It's a disaster. Thank you.

I don't doubt as Sebastian Mallaby doesn't doubt in his book that Jim Wolfensohn was motivated by a desire to reduce poverty, but why the conclusion that this is the institution that can do the most to reduce it? Is it the right people with the right training with the right world view?

Part of the frustration is external and equally part of it I think is driven by the fear that if you put wrong foot wrong in your environmental impact assessment it can have 17 volumes. If there is one bit wrong you will attract an NGO campaign, which will point out the one thing that you got wrong or the three things that you got wrong and leave aside the ones that you got right. And this will be debilitating. You will then have faced a media campaign, a reaction in Congress and so on.

Thank you. About the future of the Chad-Cameroon project I think that the broad coalition of NGOs working on the project have been consistent by saying that the Chad-Cameroon project would not help elevate poverty in Chad in the context where there is no democracy, there is no good government, and where people are poor and where their view is not taken into account.

And that is exactly what is happening now. The project is over and money is coming to Chad. And there is no signal to show that the project is helping poor people in Chad. The main reason that the World Bank was given to say that this project would help elevate poverty was the law on the management of the revenue, which established the oversight committee.

But what is clear now is that the oversight committee would not be effective enough to allow the money to go to the benefit of the poor. Because as you all know the government of Chad will always find a way to go around all those and it's always already happening, because the oversight committee does not have the real power to take action against the misused of funds.

For those of us who believe as Sebastian said that trading oil for pluralism is actually a positive goal, there was a lot to hope for this project, and there's a lot still to try and use the project for. And if people like Dobian Assingar, who's in the room today, and is a member of the oversight committee can be empowered, if civil society in Chad can be empowered to play a more important role in the country and in the spending of money

I wanted to pose two questions I guess related to that. One is at what point do we stop and reflect whether or not these are the right projects to be rushing through and implementing? There seems to be a nostalgia for the time when infrastructure projects, which I understand from several articles and from hearing Mr. Mallaby speak before, are the solution to poverty. The time when those projects could push ahead without hindrances such as the social and environmental safeguard policies of the institution.

Sebastian you mentioned here again that NGOs have exaggerated, and I think that you seem to say that we have exaggerated on the environment. And in the Chad-Cameroon project we have exaggerated on the environment you claim because Exxon has provided 19 volumes of environmental assessment studies. And you are repeating that twice.

I wonder what the journalistic standard was that leads you to believe that the simple volume of paper provided by Exxon is actually addressing the environment when there are World Bank commissioned reports out there that have been out there for several years which show very clearly that everything from coastal resources to indigenous peoples, to fresh water sources is actually being threatened by mistakes made in the project. That's a specific question.

you seem to believe that the poor are better off without NGO involvement, without World Bank safeguard policies, without the World Bank inspection panel. So I'm wondering if you have done some other thinking on how to hold the World Bank accountable for anything that it does, because these are the mechanisms that are more or less in place right now. We're all in favor of NGO accountability, but we are kind of surprised that you do not call for World Bank accountability nor for the accountability of the large transnational corporations.

That countries like Chad should not get debt, I say that rather than credit, debt loans from the World Bank at all because this is an odious regime, the people should not be held responsible later for repaying this debt. On the other hand, the argument could be that these kinds of loans can have a positive contribution to poverty alleviation and they should go forward. So I wonder where Delphine and Sebastian stand on that issue.

So I wanted to hear from the panelists about what you think, whether there can be, and maybe for other NGOs, and I am speaking for the IMF, whether it will increase work on governance, on public expenditure management, etc. And also whether you think there can be some work that can be done together on these issues.

the question about the odiousness of debt, it's a really tough one. I mean, debt is clearly odious in retrospect, if it fails to produce growth and therefore becomes impossible to service. Then it's odious, particularly if the recipient government at the time was dictatorial. If it succeeds, it's not odious. Lending to Suharto's dictatorship in Indonesia in the early years, not odious because it reduced poverty massively, lending towards the end when he became more corrupt then he had been before. Extremely odious. So you know there is no easy solution to that, which is why we continue to debate it. And probably will for a while.

I just pointed that out a couple of times, because 19 volumes would seem to me to be a fairly long and serious study. So the idea that there hasn't been an effort to take environmental issues seriously and social impacts seriously, I think it is. At least you have to pause and think about whether one can say that it was unserious after 19 volumes.

What I say is that the safeguards have kind of grown beyond the original intent. As in this picture that I drew for you before of the pendulum, right, in the early 90s or the mid 90s you had the safeguards then. And that was a good thing. That's what I regard as the sensible, middle ground in this balance between environmental caution and on the other hand needing to get projects out the door in order to try to help poor people.

My point in the book is simply that if you think about what is the niche for the Bank in development you've got lots of groups that could build schoolrooms, which can do clinics. And I'm all for the Bank doing some of that. But if you think about a big dam, which is going to produce hydropower for several different countries, that's multinational. Well, the World Bank is multinational. It's going to take a long time to build and the benefits would be over a very long period. But the Bank has very long-term loans it can give.

It has environmental consequences. Well, the Bank has environmentalists. It has social impact. Well, the Bank has some anthropologists, a few. Perhaps it should have more. It has engineering consequences. Well, the Bank has engineers. It has big economic and public revenue management issues. And the Bank has people in those areas.

This is what you need, a big multinational, multi sexual organization for. You don't need it necessarily to go and build schools in a village, which could be done by a smaller organization just as well. So that's my only suggestion. That if you look at World Bank lending towards dams, it goes up in the 60s and 70s, peaks in the 80s, starts falling from the early 80s when the Environmental Defense Funds and other people started to shine the spotlight on the problems. And I think that they were right to do so at that point. It goes down, down, down, down, until it the first five years of Wolfensohn's leadership, between 95 and 2000, zero new big dam projects, zero new projects, zero. Maybe that's just a bit too far. Maybe the pendulum again needs to swing back a little bit.

I'm Greg Binkert. I was the World Bank country manager for three years in Chad. So I met Delphine and the other ones. I finished my job by the end of the September, so I am no longer there. But I'd just like to make maybe a few sort of general comments. On the role of NGOs I must say I've worked very well with them. And they play a very, very important role in this whole project.

it was very important, and it was a very, very important feedback mechanism, particular NGOs in Moundou, in Doba. They had a lot of information that we would not have gotten otherwise. And they were very important also for the whole outreach and development planning that is not finished yet, but the process got underway. It's very important for this inclusive type of governance to have a broader approach and it played a very positive role.

But also the other thing in my three years there I had to get used to their language, which is a very, sort of an extreme language, which even today I encounter again, which is for example here peers say well, the compensation is a total tragedy, a total failure.

Well, probably you could have done it, that's what I heard you say. You can correct me if I misunderstood. But that's not the way that I saw it. For the three years that I traveled a lot through the villages I saw big things. I saw the number of bicycles going up and up. I saw sewing machines going up and up. I don't have the exact figure in mind, but it's about half to 60 percent of the compensations were paid in kind. So they were using those things.

So I was not revealing that cost with Ellen Brown. But I mean there are lots of positive examples. There are also negative examples. But I got used to that, the language where you can stand next to a school, a newly built school and not say we have not seen anything positive at all.

But when we look at ,today you presented a much more nuanced picture of what you're trying to say. But when you read your book, when you read your writings you get this arc of an argument that says NGOs bash the Bank, Wolfensohn opens up, NGOs continue to bash the Bank.

So what's the conclusion? Close down the space? Close down the participatory space of the Bank for working with NGOs? And I ask this because we're already hearing the Mallaby argument to be invoked inside of the World Bank, to dismiss criticisms of what the World Bank is doing. Because the way that your argument was presented in your writing leads to an easy conclusion that we don't need to be listening to these people.

And it's something that the Bank to a large degree has been resistant to. And it's been something that we can't understand why Jim Wolfensohn, who is someone who speaks about them rhetorically hasn't made those changes in the Bank itself.

I think that Ellen Brown take her word for what you will, her line is that, when I talked to her about this issue, she was perfectly up front and said yes, the compensation thing some people took the money. I tried to develop partnerships with local NGOs to go and counsel people on accepting in-client conversation or thinking about how you're going to use the cash if you get cash. She thinks that the cooperation from the NGO side in doing early counseling with villagers on this issue of money management that they didn't cooperate because as much as they should have because they were often more trying to kind of attack the whole project. And that if there would be a better partnership there, there might have been a better compensation story. I mean, Peter might know more. But I think those are just some comments on that one.

And that particularly experiences like the one that I describe in my book with western China poverty, where the inspection panel played a very central role, and it became an incredibly sort of bruising experience from all points of view I think. Because even if you wanted the project to have more environmental protections the fact is that the criticism of the Bank drove the Bank after the project so that the Chinese then went ahead and did the project by themselves, relocated twice as many people as they were going to, scraped a lot of the environmental protections the Bank had built into the project. And so even, you know from any perspective, whether you're an environmentalist, someone who cares about Tibetan rights, anything, it seems like the outcome was appalling, because the Chinese just went ahead and did it on their own without any safeguards at all.

Now one reason why Ellen Brown is probably the most hated person in these three villages is because she's the most visible person in those villages. She goes there and none of these people in these villages has seen an office, a government official from agriculture, water, health or anything else in probably the last decade. They see someone who represents money and means. And they're not getting what they want.

And it seems like the tension. What we saw was the increase in tension and frustration. And then going into things like compensation, those bicycles for one year of use of land? You're out then looking at the long-term ,It had a bizarreness to it that only was experienced, where we only felt like it when we were on the ground.

I would say something about the good project -- who should decide that a given project is a good project? Is it the World Bank, the oil companies, or the governments? And where is the poor people's place, because the development projects are about them. Do they have a voice? Do they have something to say about that? So I feel if they have a voice and if they have something to do about that then NGOs need to play a role. And I thank Binkert for raising that NGOs have played a positive role in the Chad-Cameroon project.

I want to say a few things about the language that Binkert talked about. It could be extreme. But when you are in Chad and when you see what is happening that is not extreme because what does that mean for a person who lost his leg to have a bicycle? And I would say that most of those bicycles already broke down and they don't have means to repair them.

So are we talking about the same development? The development has to be sustainable. And in this case what the World Bank and the consortium are trying to show as development signals is for us meaningless. They would show that a family who has gotten compensation has bought a new dress for kids and a new sewing machine. But who is going to pay them for a dress or for any services, I don't know.

I think that it's more complicated. It's more important than that. And we need things that could really be sustainable. And the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline is not giving us opportunity for a sustainable development in Chad.

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Our everyday life is permeated with power plays, strive for and and-or intrusion of authority that is maintainable through coercion or manipulation. If we try to understand this, resist power plays by other individual, organizations and state-authorities, we can achieve and spread genuine freedom.